Ironclad should make an FP4XS :)

from Sins Forums
Sounds absurd right? First person 4x Shooter?

Think about this. It could be the most amazing game you've never played.

The game is played with two or more rather massive teams, on maps that are absolutely enormous in terms of size and scope, to the extent where walking is going to be long, boring, and futile. The maps are littered with empty buildings. Some of them are simply buildings, others can be more defensible bunkers, fortresses, headquarters, research stations, power plants, mines, etc.

Each team has, for example, three classes of armor (light, medium, heavy), weaponry, 'item slots' to customize their loadouts (for example, a cloaking device, shield projector, repair tools, etc. They also can use these item slots to build 'constructables', which include vehicles and static base components. Static base components cost team resources and require power, which is provided via deployable generators, solar panels, batteries, or whatever will provide enough juice in a large enough area (so a sensor might be able to work on a solar panel, but a handful of heavy missile turrets will require a generator)

The goal of the game is to destroy the enemy spawn beacon - a portable device they can move around (but cannot spawn on if it's not deployed). They only have one.

You start the game in a very vulnerable section of the map. You assemble your team, and using your scant few starting team resources, assemble a fleet of vehicles, equip up, and move out with your spawn beacon. Your first move is to chose a home. You move into a building, and how you proceed is up to you. You can litter the place with sensor jammers, to mask your presence from enemy scouts, or you can build a fortress and send legions of player-manned bombers out to level the enemy. You secure resources, establish forward bases in other abandoned buildings, use realistic terrain to your advantage, and smash the enemy :D

Problems with this game is that it'd be rather long, and certainly niche, but I for one would absolutely adore a game like this. The learning curve and pace of the game would drive away the FPS idiots that clog Battlefield and the like, but I guess it comes down to the financial feasability...
20,554 views 21 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Definately very cool :) You should listen to my Immortal Machines podcast, I talk about something similiar :)
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Ah? Where's that? Last podcast I listened to was on Evil Avatar, but I called in to ask you guys about the future of Ironclad past Sins. You described some 'super secret genre-bending stuff in the future' and while I've always had a game of this idea in my mind, a career in game development just isn't going to happen for me (unless I can get a job just telling people to make my games like Will Wright... :P)

When I saw Sins and the carrots you gave me on that podcast, I thought just MAYBE something like this could breathe life into another genre that is clogged with cliches... :)

I hate to sound like a drooling fanboy, but as a lifelong PC gamer who has always felt utterly let down by the 'games' of the last several years as they get more and more 'mainstreamed', when I saw Sins, when I heard you guys talking about how you just wanted to 'make a good game' (which is what inspired Fallout - not money, but because they always wanted to play a post-apocalyptic RPG), it was love at first... um... post...?

EDIT: Found it!

WWW Link
DeskScapes - Bring your desktop background to life.
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
This sounds like..... PLANETSIDE!!!!!

I love that game so much :)
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Well to me it sounded like a cross between Battlezone and Tribes. Not that that's a bad thing, as they are both brilliant games
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
This sounds like..... PLANETSIDE!!!!!I love that game so much
End of quote


Planetside was a brilliant game that lost so much due to the limits SOE put on it. Despite its flaws, the game that I played at release was, well, life-changing, almost. The concepts it presented, the way it worked, and how WELL it worked utterly ruined any future perceptions I had for FPS games. Whereas Planetside made me hunger for games that were as deep, strategic, and utterly well-rounded as it was, instead, the FPS market took a turn for the opposite.

Whereas in Planetside you could focus on a 'specialty', and had different characters to be diverse (ie: a Heavy Armor soldier, or a Support soldier...), games like Battlefield were the exact opposite - any moron could jump in a tank and smash commies. That's not what I want. I want to not only EARN my right, but I want it to be done in a way that realistically limits availability of things that should be limited.

One of my favorite concepts was the training in America's Army. Any boob can pass boot camp, but in order to get the better weapons, you have to endure a long, boring, grueling, unfair SERE course. While something that tedious is a little off, I don't think that in a game where you will have aircraft equipped with cluster bombs, that anyone should be able to jump in there. It should be designed in a way that the people who are good at flying aircraft should be the only ones doing that.

Sadly, the game Planetside was at release is not the game it is now. SOE took it in a direction that was not what Dave Georgeson wanted, focusing players into close-quarters battles by drawing action AWAY from the outdoors areas, crushing them into little cookie-cutter bases, and 'balancing' weaponry in a way that favored overly-lethal spam weapons.

Assault rifles in Planetside were 'arcadey'. In REXO armor, you could take quite a beating and keep on fighting. It was like Tribes - You can take quite a lot of damage compared to say, Counter-Strike. In Planetside, you would have frontlines drawn even in arbitrary places, trading gunfire, and it would lead to a very cinematic experience. Then you'd have Heavy Weapons, one that would kill in one shot, one that would kill in 45 shots, but do so in about one second, and one that you could just fire blindly down a hall and kill everyone in it since you couldn't dodge its projectiles.

Planetside was about slower pace, more 'thought-provoking' battles, but SOE seemed to drag it in the 'FPS NOOB' direction to just get more money (and it failed - the game population dropped dramatically), including overbalancing every side every month, putting in stupid game-ruining robots, etc.

The engine was also badly in need of optimization. It actually worked better back when I played it on 56k then it did on a cable line.

That said, Tribes 2 is my absolute most-favorite game I've ever played. It's without a doubt the BEST MPFPS game I've ever played. Dave Georgeson is one of my developer heroes. Planetside, without a doubt, was ahead of its time, but where the game could've been, and where the game ended up (Mechs? Instant Action? Capitals? Boooo....) was just way too different, and the game actually suffered for it. Everyone wanted big outdoors battles, and SOE made them just smash battles into the same bases over and over.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Ooh, Battlezone. I forgot about that one, that was back in the dialup internet days but multiplayer was probably the greatest thing I've ever experienced, in many ways even today, as far as online fps games. What you're describing also sounds like an epic scale version of Battlefield 2142's Titan mode combined with Tribes, as also is mentioned above :)

And, the first thing I thought of when reading your description was Armed Assault, and the fact that getting into the multiplayer on that game is at the moment very difficult unless you have a few friends with the game.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
Ooh, Battlezone. I forgot about that one, that was back in the dialup internet days but multiplayer was probably the greatest thing I've ever experienced, in many ways even today, as far as online fps games. What you're describing also sounds like an epic scale version of Battlefield 2142's Titan mode combined with Tribes, as also is mentioned above :)

And, the first thing I thought of when reading your description was Armed Assault, and the fact that getting into the multiplayer on that game is at the moment very difficult unless you have a few friends with the game.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
I will say this - Great Tribal War. These three words are going to be utterly meaningless to 99.999% of the population here, but I bet there's one other person here who will read that and experience a rush of nostalgia.

I, and the other niche players who played it, pretty much experienced a game that was, and I do not exaggerate, unlike absolutely anything I'd ever played before. Honestly, people that went into that didn't leave the same. Ever since those few games I played, almost every other FPS game has seemed... juvenile, almost.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
EDIT: Double Post
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
Sins of Free Space!

Love it :)

Perhaps one day...
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
Sounds like the player vs player terretory battles MMORPG offer. And they are fun ;) I'd also love to see a game centered around these.
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
To be perfectly honest, I'd rather to be able to play as a fighter or bomber squadron commander in the middle of a Sins war, dodging flak, bombing structures and assaulting tradeships. Heck, if the higher-resolution models are coming soon with 1.1, a lot of the formative work might already be done! :) 

-- Retro
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
Retroboy just reminded me of a very cool game i played when i was a kid...

Wing Commander Armada!

a little bit of strategy game and a space combat simulator...
now that was one great game!
just very short...

Would fit great to the Sins universe :)
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
Actually this sounds more like the Empires HL2 mod to me.
Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
SOE took it in a direction that was not what Dave Georgeson wanted, focusing players into close-quarters battles by drawing action AWAY from the outdoors areas
End of quote


Ah yes... the big patch right before Core Combat released made me a 'very' unhappy sniper. Outdoor infantry combat was altogether squashed in less than a day.

Damn shame. I, too, have quite a few fond memories of that game.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
Uranium, it sounds like you still pine for the original Natural Selection before it turned into a rush game. Wasn't it 1.04, or was it an earlier release?

Yeah, I remember you from those forums. :)
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
Interesting idea Uranium, i like it.

But I must say that to implement those ideas would a royal pain in the ass to whom ever develop a game like that. Things like spawn camping on the one portable device(simply for griefing), actually finding your enemy in the huge map and not spend hours chasing ghosts and having no action, the balance of having customizable player classes, and something which Sins already suffer from, some games take so many hours to finish, players run out of time and have to drop from the game mid-game, leaving their teammates outnumbered.

Planetside, EVE, two MMOs with great potential but poor execution. If anyone have the expertise and capital to develop a game like this, i'll be the first one to buy the game, ofcourse it has to be fun. :D
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
Freelancer was a great game - anyone play that one?
Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top
Freelancer, Earth and Beyond, X3 (once you got over the nearly vertical learning curve)...

All good times. Shame they don't do more of those sorts of games. With graphical updates, I'll bet they'd look pretty damned attractive nowadays.
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top
Empires is a mod for HL2 you may enjoy. Multiple class, customizable skills/weapon loadouts, vehicles, huge techtree, RTS basebuilding (like, proper, build-anywhere-you-like basebuilding). On a full server with two organised teams battles are epic

I'm hooked on it. Check out this review.
Reply #21 from Sins Forums Top
Uranium, it sounds like you still pine for the original Natural Selection before it turned into a rush game. Wasn't it 1.04, or was it an earlier release?Yeah, I remember you from those forums.
End of quote


:D